Editorial: The true story of Thanksgiving

Wednesday

Nov 23, 2011 at 12:01 AMNov 23, 2011 at 11:16 PM

Americans' knowledge of their history is so incomplete and so twisted by popular culture that most associate Indian wars with the settling of the West and recall Indians only as the kind natives who taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn.

The story of what Americans call the first Thanksgiving has been told and retold for generations in schools, churches and around tables crowded with traditional foods.

It's a good story, reinforcing messages of gratitude, humility and inclusion, and it's mostly true.

The Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony survived a brutal first winter with help from members of the Wampanoag tribe, led by a sachem named Massasoit. They had plenty to be grateful for after the harvest of 1621, and they invited the Indians to join them in a feast of thanksgiving.

But the story didn't end there. Over the next decades, relations between English settlers and native Americans steadily deteriorated. Treaties were broken. Native land rights were bought, traded or stolen outright. Atrocities were committed by both sides.

In 1675, Massasoit's son, known as Metacom or, to the English, King Philip, launched a war against the colonists. Over the next year, nearly half of New England's villages were attacked by Indians. Thousands were killed, with stunning brutality. Indian raiders kidnapped and killed women and children. An army of settlers surrounded and burned a large village of peaceful Narragansett Indians, an incident historians call the Great Swamp Massacre.

King Philip's war ended with King Philip's head stuck on a pike outside the gates of Plymouth, Mass., and New England's Indians in permanent retreat. Over the next 200 years, the same tragic scenes would play out in the South, the Midwest and, finally, the Great Plains, as white settlers took the continent away from the people who had lived here for centuries.

Americans' knowledge of their history is so incomplete and so twisted by popular culture that most associate Indian wars with the settling of the West and recall Indians only as the kind natives who taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn.

Our history is richer, and more tragic, than the limited view seen in popular culture. To understand where we come from, Americans must tell all the stories, not just the ones that fit the calendar of holidays.